Recently my monitor has started flickering…gets just a little narrower (squeezing in on the sides maybe a 1/4" on each side, just for a split second).
This only happens when I’m in Windows…DOS stuff like games are still just fine.
SO what, I ask, is up with that??
If my monitor was about to take a dump, wouldn’t it do it in both Windows and DOS??
Same with the video card??
Any troubleshooting tips? I hate to buy a new monitor only to find out that wasn’t it. I hate to go through the hell of loading new video card drivers and putting in a new vid card if it’s not the problem.
That’s weird Duke of Rat as I’ve been having a similar problem. My monitor will expand for 10 seconds or so, then contrast back to where it wss. Sometimes it does this several times in less than a minute; but it at least happens 3 times a day.
If you are certain it is specific to windows, then check, reload, or check for updates on your windows video card driver. Try starting your system in safe mode. If it runs stable in windows using the generic VGA 16 color 640x480, then it is specific to the Win driver you have loaded. You can check your refresh rate and plug and play monitor driver as well. Hope that helps.
Monitors are prone to doing all sorts of weird stuff like this before they finally die. Sometimes they last for years doing this stuff and don’t get any worse, other times they die pretty quickly. It’s happening in Windoze and not DOS because the monitor is switching sync rates and it’s stable at some rates and unstable at others.
Games will often run in lower resolutions, just because it’s awful darn hard to pump enough information to fill a higher resolution and still keep the frame rate up to something your eye is happy with. If you have a component that is starting to show some thermal stress, then it will fail first at the higher resolutions since at higher speeds all of the little transistors and such get hotter.
There are of course a lot of other differences between windows and dos programs, such as the fact that windows programs use the windows driver, and dos programs access the video card directly, bypassing any driver issues or possibly a virus.
Well I just did the unplug the cable deal…seems to help, of course it’s like the car that you take to the mechanic…works great when he’s looking at it. NO jitters and it’s been on for 4 hours.
I’m fairly certain no virus…
I backed off the refresh rate before and it didn’t make a difference…
I’m running a Matrox G400Max…so getting new drivers is like mining salt from a diamond…
The only way to tell for sure is trying another monitor or video card and seeing if the problem persists. Based on your description on the problem and experience over the years with monitors I would assign the following probabilities to the source of your problems.
Depending on the failing component it’s often harder for a monitor to keep properly spec’d at the higher refresh frequencies in windows vs the baseline VGA frequencies of DOS mode.